Author Archive
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Techmeetup Aberdeen #4 – 17th February 2010
Another very enjoyable evening was had last night at Aberdeen’s 4th Techmeetup with two very entertaining speakers, fuelled (at least in Alan’s case) by a healthy supply of beer and pizza.
Behaviour-Driven Development
The first talk of the evening, given by Alan Gardner, was on behaviour-driven development (or BDD). Proposed by Dan North in 2003, BDD takes test-driven development’s philosophy of fail, fix, refactor and applies it from the outside-in. Rather than starting at the model level and working outwards as test-driven development does, BDD creates tests directly from user requirement statements.
Alan finished his presentation by walking through a simple Cucumber/RSpec example.
Useful links:
A talk by Joseph Wilks at SoR09
Pragmatic Programmer RSpec Book (still in beta)
The Alive Project
Dave Corsar was next up with his talk on the Alive project with which, through Aberdeen University, he is involved. The concepts behind this project are fairly abstract, but if I had to try I would say it is a robust and scalable framework for the provision of distributed services.
Dave illustrated this by providing a concrete example of a project being developed for CalicoJack. Here the requirement is for the system to choose the most appropriate method of communication with employees based on the urgency of the message, the current location of that employee and other pertinent considerations. Dave, used this example to describe how the three tier architecture of the framework could be applied to this problem.
Dave also mentioned briefly the use of the framework in a Thales project in the development of a system to aid the evacuation of the Netherlands in the event of a flood.
The video’s for the talk will be posted on Vimeo shortly.
Monday, February 15th, 2010
TechMeetup Aberdeen #4 – 17th February 2010
Once again TechMeetup will be held in the North Side Meston Building at Aberdeen Uni (map) from 6:30 onwards.
To make it easier to find out who the people around you are and what they’re interested in we’ll be using Bloop. You can post messages (called bubbles) about what you would like to talk about or what you’re looking for at the event and see what others are interested in talking about. Check out this fun intro for how it works how to use Bloop.
Come along, have a beer and some pizza and listen to what should be two very interesting talks.
Alan Gardner
Ask a bunch of software developers about Behaviour Driven Development and some will say, “It’s the natural successor to Test Driven Development!”, others will say, “It *IS* Test Driven Development, the difference is merely semantics!”, most will probably say, “What the fuzzy duck is Behaviour Driven Development?”
This talk aims to give a brief insight into BDD and will cover a (very) brief history of BDD, the goals and tenets of BDD and will hopefully have enough time towards the end for a quick example.
Dave Corsar
This talk will describe how the ALIVE-EU approach to developing dynamic and robust software based on a service-oriented architecture is being adopted by CalicoJack, a Dundee based communication management company. They are developing the back-end for a virtual communication device which attempts to ensure messages are sent to recipients via a channel appropriate to their current social context and the current availability of services which handle the sending a message, regardless of the message’s originating channel. This means the phone call from your mother-in-law doesn’t interrupt your meeting but becomes an SMS message instead, while the same phone call, had it been on your train journey home does arrive as a phone call. To achieve this, the ALIVE-EU framework harnesses knowledge technologies (ontologies), organisation theory, software agents, planning and Web services (including matchmaking) to provide complete working solutions of complex systems that are more like what we see in human societies. The ALIVE-EU framework is also being used to support simulations of crisis management and urban information services.
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
TechMeetup Aberdeen #2 – 18th November 2009
There was another good turn out for Aberdeen’s second TechMeetup last night. It was great to see some familiar faces from last month’s meet, along with quite a few new faces.
Once again our sincere thanks goes to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen for their sponsorship of the event. And of course a special thank you to Dr Bruce Sharlau for once again organising the room, beer and pizza.
The first talk of the evening was about developing for the Microsoft Surface and was presented jointly by Kate Ho and Neelima Alluri. Kate started the talk with a cringe-worthy promotional video from Microsoft, demonstrating how the surface could be used to pick up girls in a Las Vegas bar. She then went on to describe some more practical uses, including two conceptual applications with which the presenters won a Royal Bank of Scotland backed competition; an interactive mortgage advisor and an application which would provide account information for a credit card placed on the surface. Neelima then took the stage to describe some of the under the cover detail of developing for the surface.
Special thanks also needs to be given to Mark Griffiths and his team from Codify for bringing along a surface for people to experience for themselves, no mean feat as the equipment was not designed to be particularly portable.
Next up Dave Westwater gave a fascinating talk on the BabyTalk project with which he has been involved. The aim of this project, jointly run by members of Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities, is to use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to communicate the details of babies in a hospital’s high dependancy unit to nurses coming on duty. The system, which is currently being trialled at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, takes data from a wide variety of sources and produces English language sentences summarising the information.
Dave also described how a spin-off startup company (Data2Text) has been established to, for example, use this technology to automatically compile the shipping forecast, a task which is currently several hours work for a human.
The videos for both talks will be posted shortly.